Monday, 18 January 2016

Re: RFC on Cloud Images: Make /tmp a tmpfs

Seth Arnold [2016-01-14 16:25 -0800]:
> The risks and downsides of swapspace feel like a lot compared to the
> slight hassle of having the installer make a swap partition.

I just want to mention that this is far from a "slight hassle". We
managed to screw up the swap partition for many cycles -- as soon as
you enabled "encrypt my home dir" (which is rather popular) or
manually partitioned on LVM, we either left the system with a
disfunctional swap (i. e. wasting lots of space but not using it) or
with an unencrypted swap (thereby leaking data from encrypted
partitions).

See LP #1453738, #1447282, and the really infamous #953875 for
example. These are all fixed now, but the fact that this went
unnoticed for so many years is perhaps telling that swap partitions
are not that important any more :-)

(Note, I come from the angle of real-iron installs, not cloud
instances.)